Home: Chronicle of a North Country Life

By Beth Powning

Home is like a leaf on a tree: other people, other homes, are the other leaves. They live beneath the same sky, share the same memories, survive the same storms.

But one leaf is a solitude.

After twenty-five years on a New Brunswick farm, award-winning Canadian author Beth Powning came to understand the land she calls home. Now, almost twenty years after the initial publication of Home, readers may once again experience the spirit of home in nature in this new edition of her seminal book.

Time has made the subtle messages beyond her door become clearer, if not less mysterious: the glorious rawness of winter storms, the effortless dominance of oak trees, the distinctive poetry of night, the universes found within a humble garden.

Placing herself in the dual roles of explorer and storyteller, Powning waltzes the unspoken divide between the untamed and the domestic, revelling in the complex bonds that exist between the natural world and those who would seek to navigate its wonders.

Originally released in Canada as Seeds of Another Summer, this new edition, which includes a new introduction and gorgeous reproductions of Powning's sumptuous nature photography, will inspire those who seek a simpler life and enchant those who are already there.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Goose Lane Editions
• Release date: Oct 7, 2014
• ISBN: 9780864927286

Beth Powning

Beth Powning grew up in a small New England town, where her family has lived since the 1790s. In 1972, she and her husband Peter Powning moved to Canada and bought an 1870s farm in New Brunswick, where they established a pottery business. In 1995, Beth Powning published a book of photography, Roses for Canadian Gardens (written by childhood friend Bob Osborne). She later found her voice in Home: Chronicle of a North Country Life. Over the next fifteen years, five books followed: another book of photographs, Northern Trees and Shrubs; two works of non-fiction, Shadow Child and Edge Seasons; and three bestselling novels, The Hatbox Letters, The Sea Captain’s Wife, and A Measure of Light.

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About this book

Home is like a leaf on a tree: other people, other homes, are the other leaves. They live beneath the same sky, share the same memories, survive the same storms.

But one leaf is a solitude.

After twenty-five years on a New Brunswick farm, award-winning author Beth Powning came to understand the land she calls home. Now, almost 20 years after the initial publication of Home, readers may once again experience the spirit of home in nature in this new edition of her seminal book.

Time has made the subtle messages of the valley beyond her door clearer, if not less mysterious: the glorious rawness of winter storms, the effortless dominance of oak trees, the distinctive poetry of night, the universes found within a humble garden.

Placing herself in the dual roles of explorer and storyteller, Powning navigates the unspoken divide between the untamed and the domestic, revelling in the complex bonds that exist between the natural world and those who would seek to explore its wonders.

Home was originally released in 1996 in Canada as Seeds of Another Summer and in the US as Home. This new edition, which includes a new introduction and gorgeous reproductions of Powning’s sumptuous nature photography, will inspire those who seek a simpler life and enchant those who have already found it.

Praise for Home

Beth’s sense of home is not of a static dwelling, but of a place of seasons, cycles, and lifespans, or experiences and memories. This is a book for your soul.

— Freeman Patterson, The Telegraph-Journal

Powning takes her camera, her pen and, most important, her spirit into the landscape. . . . The delicate, often beautiful photographs combine with a quietly spirited naturalistic prose in an Annie Dillard–Henry David Thoreau mode to produce a work evocative in both sensual and domestic ways.

— The Globe and Mail

Powning supplements her lyrical photos of the details of nature’s beauties with equally lyrical passages about the spiritual succor she finds on the boundaries between the natural and the human.

— The Vancouver Sun

In a world increasingly cynical and numb, Powning puts a light in the window for us all, wherever we call home.

— The Chicago Tribune

Other books by Beth Powning

The Sea Captain’s Wife (2010)

Edge Seasons: A Mid-Life Year (2005)

The Hatbox Letters (2004)

Shadow Child: A Woman’s Journey Through Childbirth Loss (1999)

Seeds of Another Summer: Finding The Spirit of Home in Nature (1996)

Copyright © 1996, 2014 by Beth Powning.

All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced or used in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or any retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher or a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). To contact Access Copyright, visit www.accesscopyright.ca or call 1-800-893-5777.

An earlier version of this book was originally published in 1996 under the title Seeds of Another Summer.

Epigraphs to Boundaries and Wild Plants are copyright © 2003 by Gary Snyder from The Practice of the Wild (Berkeley, CA: Counterpoint, 2010). Used by permission of Counterpoint.

The epigraph to Gardens is from Henry David Thoreau, Walden.

The epigraph to Fields is from Wendell Berry, From the Crest, in Clearing (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977). Used by permission.

The epigraph to Trees is from John Fowles, The Tree (Toronto: Collins, 1979).

The epigraph to Home is from Gary Snyder, Ripples on the Surface, in No Nature (New York: Pantheon, 1992). Used by permission of the author.

Cover and page design by Julie Scriver.

All photographs by Beth Powning.

eBook development: WildElement.ca

Cataloguing data available from Library and Archives Canada.

Goose Lane Editions acknowledges the generous support of the Canada Council for the Arts, the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund (CBF), and the Government of New Brunswick through the Department of Tourism, Heritage and Culture.

Goose Lane Editions

500 Beaverbrook Court, Suite 330

Fredericton, New Brunswick

CANADA E3B 5X4

www.gooselane.com

to Peter and Jacob with love

Contents

Introduction

Boundaries

Gardens

Fields

Trees

Wild Plants

Home

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Eighteen years after the publication of Home (first published in Canada as Seeds of Another Summer), my husband and I still live in New Brunswick, on the farm that we bought in the spring of 1970. I have written other books, but Home, the story of our early years on the farm, is special to me, for it was where I found my voice as a writer.

The coyotes are newcomers. On the day that I hand-wrote these words, which became the first sentence of Home, I felt a thrill of release. My pencil scratched, urgently; words darkened the paper. These words were mine, my voice, as familiar as the windowsill and the spring night that I wished to describe; and yet they were impelled from something larger, a fecund place that I needed to explore. Newcomers — like us, I thought, staring at the words. The coyotes are newcomers.

Human and wild . . .

I decided I would be an author when I was eight years old. I majored in creative writing at Sarah Lawrence College, writing a novel, The Mystery Sang Alive, as my undergraduate thesis. The year I graduated, we moved to New Brunswick, where I began a self-imposed apprenticeship, studying and writing short stories. I hung a portrait of Virginia Woolf over my desk, and in the predawn light (for there was real work to do in the daytime hours) I held my hands in the shape of a bowl, a container for beauty. This is what I want to make, I thought, like a prayer. But the stories came only after great effort — I gave them too much thought, yearned for perfection, let them break my heart. A handful were published. Many were returned. Eventually, I wrote a novel, Shadows, and acquired a literary agent in New York City. There was a possible two-book deal from Little, Brown, but then my agent’s letters became boozily incoherent and we fell out of touch.

I stopped writing.

I felt nauseous at the sight of my unused desk, with its Smith Corona typewriter and stacks of paper. The pages of my journal went blank.

Then I picked up a camera.

I knelt on wet soil and there, in the viewfinder, was a green fern, pearled with dew. Or the blue-veined underside of an autumn leaf. Pebbles, with their fluid shadows. The translucent petal of a pink ladyslipper. My camera — microscope, wand, sacred text — took me to the realms of science, magic, religion. There was no blank page to contend with; no need to imagine or describe. In reverence

Reviews for Home

[oldblack-1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Not just beautiful writing but magnificent photographs that together show Beth Powning as a person who is closely in touch with the physical world around her. She must surely rank among the most fully integrated people I know of. I thought of her this morning as I took an early morning walk and a noisy miner bird swooped down and attacked my (bald) head with its beak. Rather than cursing the bird, as would be my immediate response, I thought about what Beth's response might be....perhaps seeing myself as the aggressor, invading this creature's precious territory, marveling at how brave such a tiny creature is to take on an animal hundreds of times its size and weight. Who else but Beth Powning could look forward to a New Brunswick winter blizzard? and that must be almost a metaphor for her whole life. I read this book as I recovered from cancer surgery and found a wonderful synergy between the two, and enjoyed a measure of new life from both.

[tigerlms · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I love this book! I've read it three times over the last ten years. The photographs and the prose are wonderful, and in many ways it makes me want to live the life she's describing--- until I realize that plant-killing frosts come in August and the spring thaw doesn't really happen until late May. I consider this more poetry than non-fiction, but it's a great take on life lived outside suburbia and up close and personal with nature.